10 Horror Movie Villains You Didn't Realise Actually Won
4. Dr. Ellie Staple - Glass
M. Night Shyamalan's Glass wraps up in deeply polarising fashion, with all three superpowered protagonists - The Horde (James McAvoy), Mr. Glass (Samuel L. Jackson), and David Dunn (Bruce Willis) - all being killed off.
The film's categorical hero, Dunn, is drowned in a puddle by a SWAT team member at the behest of Dr. Ellie Staple (Sarah Paulson), who reveals herself to be Glass' true villain - a member of a secret society which has been supressing the existence of superpowered people for millennia.
Yet the final scenes seems to offer something of a posthumous victory for the supers, as it's revealed that Mr. Glass had footage of the fight between the Horde and Dunn live-streamed to the Internet, where it appears to go viral.
This seems to put the kibosh on Staple's plans to keep the supers under wraps, then, except that Shyamalan has a rather optimistic interpretation of how such a video would actually be interpreted by the world at large.
Sure, there are many who simply believe everything they see online, but in a so-called "post-truth" era, where anyone with a smartphone can easily fabricate such a fight, would people en masse really accept it as real?
Would it be easier to believe that superpowered people exist or that someone cooked up a well-made hoax?
In an era where AI is now muddying the waters more than ever, it's simply impossible to believe that such a video would ever have the tectonic, global ramifications that Shyamalan's ending readily implies.